The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

by Kris Radish

  The winter passed, and Annie grew and grew inside me and then Chester was laid off again. We had to go on the County Relief but our folks helped too when they could with a bit of food and baby clothes, though Chester hated anything like that and I told him to shush and take what we needed so that we would do the same for our own children. He sulked and pounded through our tiny house until I asked him to leave. Then he would stroll through the yard until he figured out he could get in the old truck and drive downtown. When he pulled out of the long driveway during those days, my heart would often twitch and move inside of my chest because as mean as he could get, I knew that Chester loved me and I did love him back.

  Richard had been so perfect and easy to carry and deliver, I never thought about possible troubles and heartaches. I hauled the wood and kept up the house and planned what it would be like to have this baby girl. Never, ever did I think that anything would go wrong.

  Annie wanted to see our fine winter skies and not wait for the spring rains. Chester was in the shed working on Joe Dobbyn's truck. The pains started quickly, there was no warning like with Richard. It was just after Christmas, too early for this baby that barely filled the extra tucks I had let out of my single dress. The Christmas tree was standing against the wall next to the kitchen and when the first pain shot through me, I grabbed for the tree and tumbled backward, spreading those little loops Richard and I had made with old newspaper all over the kitchen floor. Later, much later, I found one of those loops stuck in the edge of the heat register. I held it to my breast as if it were a precious gem.

  I called to Richard first, and he ran to get his daddy. Chester came flying into the house with a wrench in his hand and grease smeared from one side of his face to the other and I laughed at that. “Chester,” I told him, “we have rags you can use, honey. You don't have to wipe your hands on your face.” Chester didn't laugh. He fell to the floor right beside me and asked if we needed to go and I said, “Yes, our little girl is coming now.”

  Driving to the hospital, I didn't know what was going to happen in the next few hours—that I would never, ever have another baby, never be able to enjoy having Chester brush his hand across my breasts or make love to me. That my heart would shatter into a million pieces and the days and nights of my life would be a relentless struggle. I didn't know that Annie would have the most perfect face, and eyes that shone like the stars. Nor did I know that I would hate God for such a long time. Driving to my mother's to drop off Richard, all I knew was that Chester should hurry because my water was about to pop and fill up the space on the floor where Chester kept his spare engine parts.

  Richard ran into Mama's house oblivious to the swirl of confusion building around us. He was running toward cookies and fun and the arms of a grandma who loved to lift him up and swing him about the kitchen. He was just a baby himself, barely walking, and when he turned on the steps to blow me a kiss, I caught it in my hand and held it to my lips.

  Chester drove like a madman, never looking at me or saying a word. The bottom of the truck rumbled as if it had never been quite bolted in place and once, when he hit a rut and it felt as if my bottom had been ripped open, I shouted for him to be careful.

  These days when I go to the hospital I am amazed at how it all works. There are couches and soft lights and bedsheets that offer the colors of the rainbows. In my day, it was all cold and steel and curt doctors and nurses who made me want to run and hide. They could have been kind at least. They could have held my hands while Chester paced the halls leaving a trail of grease on the white floor. But then they were all business, and I had to calm myself, which somehow just never seemed quite right.

  What had started out so fast seemed to take forever. Annie took her sweet time moving herself down inside of me, and when I thought the pain of it all would make me pass out, I imagined her face and then I counted again. I would never tell another woman that she will forget the pain of childbirth. There is no way to forget the pain of childbirth. Years later the remembrance of the pain would wake me from the dead of sleep, and I could feel sweat running down the insides of my legs and the pillow would be soaked. It is a beautiful, wonderful miracle to have a baby but the pain, the pain can make me wince even now when I have suddenly never felt so free and happy.

  The birthing hours passed like years in that big room. Once I heard another woman come through the doors and they put her on the other side of the curtain for a while. She was crying softly and when I turned on my side, I could see the curve of her belly. I wanted everyone to go away so I could talk to her. I planned how they could move our beds together and we could lie on our sides, face to face, and hold hands. I pictured her face and made up a story about her life. I saw her later holding a baby in her arms, but I could not bear to see it or let them come near me. I am ashamed to say that now, but only since I have started this walk. With each step something new is pushed through me, something terrible from that time and the more I walk, the less there is left.

  Chester is one of those men who would not have been able to be with me even if they had let him. He is strong about many things and has seen more than his share of life and death and blood and guts while working on the farm, but he could not bear to be in the same room with me and see the arch of pain cross my face. When I finally tired of hearing his footsteps outside the delivery room, I asked the nurse to please make him sit down.

  “Sir,” I heard her whisper to him. “Your pacing is bothering your wife. She needs to concentrate now, so please take a seat out in the waiting room and don't come back here until someone comes to get you.”

  That's not quite how I would have said it but this nurse was no Florence Nightingale. Chester must have turned immediately, because I heard his boot heels hitting the floor and then there was no sound except for my own heavy breath and the nurse fooling around with some towels and more metal objects in the corner.

  This is when I started to talk to Annie. I thought if she could hear my voice that maybe she would want to come out and see what I looked like. I talked to her at first like I would to any baby. Sweet baby talk and whispers and I called her “my sweet baby girl.” I told her over and over again how much I loved her and when I wanted to bite down right through my own lip because of the pain, I talked even more.

  Just after I started talking to Annie, I noticed the nurse lift up her head to look at me. In that moment I wondered if she was a mother and if she thought about her own delivery each and every time they wheeled a crying woman through the doors of the hospital. But that is the only time she ever met my gaze. I ignored her for the rest of the time and focused only on my baby girl.

  “Sweet baby, please come out now and let your mama hold you in her arms,” I whispered to her softly. “Let me tell you what Richard is like, and what it will be like when springtime comes and we walk through the grass at the edge of the cornfields.”

  I must have talked liked this to her for hours. The talking helped me leave the pain and go to wherever it was I was talking about. I could actually see the tattered brown baby carriage and a sea of tiny green corn shoots poking through the rich, brown, muddy soil. I could bend down and smell spring in the grass and that musty cool smell that hangs across the yard each summer morning before the heat consumes everything.

  Chester told me later that the doctor came in several times to tell me to push and that if I didn't, the baby would never come out but I have never been able to remember that. I tell you I can remember that the old kitchen rags were on the line and that once I tipped the carriage toward the sun so my baby girl could feel it on her face, an then I sat down and rested my head against the side of the wicker carriage, so scratchy it reminded me of lying in the August hayfields.

  I pushed and I saw the top of the doctor's head disappear under the sheet across my legs as if he had been swallowed up into a deep and endless cave. I saw him next just as a series of contractions moved through my body like an ocean wave and I could feel the placenta push itself out.

 
The time then stretched out until each second seemed like a minute and each minute an hour. When I had Richard, the doctor tossed him into the air and shouted, “Hey, Chester has a big boy!” and I waited for that or for anything but there was only silence.

  “Tell me, please tell me,” I finally asked, my voice sounding pathetic and frightened.

  This is when the nurse could have touched me or reached out her hand. I would have given me the baby no matter what was wrong, because that is all a mother wants, to touch and see her own baby.

  But everyone waited. Finally I sat up and screamed, “Damn it, show me my baby!”

  The doctor got up and gestured to the nurse and she quickly handed him a blanket. The doctor wrapped my baby girl up, and then came up beside me. This is when I shouted for the second time. “Show me the baby, now, just show me the baby.”

  The doctor's arms moved out, and I watched his mouth open and words came spilling out, but what he was saying did not register in my mind. I only wanted that baby in my arms. It was when she came to me then that I knew she was ill because her lips were the color of the blue summer sky and her ears as red as the sky in early winter when fall will not surrender. I took her to my breast and heard the doctor whisper, “It's a girl.” That second I named her Annie Marie because that is what we'd been calling our baby girl all these months. Annie Marie. Annie Marie.

  If my baby girl would have been born anytime but then, she would have lived and I would not be walking down this highway for hours and hours. They would have patched up that tiny hole in her heart, the hole that sucked out all the days and nights and years of life that she might have had. How many years now have I thought about that? Sweet Jesus, my life has passed and I have mourned a lifetime of might-have-beens. I have rocked in front of the window and thought about those hours when I felt her quiet heart thumping against the palm of my hand. There is no way to measure a loss like that. Not every human heart can understand what it is like, only another mother, another woman who needs to walk away from such grief and loss.

  After I had Annie in my arms, I asked the doctor to tell me about her condition. She had a hole in her heart, an opening that you could put your pinkie finger right inside of. I made him show it to me, and I could see right inside of my girl where she was pink and beautiful. That was all I could think, how beautiful she was on both sides.

  “How long?” I asked and I knew by the dip of his head and the way he had his hands pressed against the side of my bed that there was nothing he could do.

  “Hard to say but it won't be long, I'm sorry, Alice, not long at all.”

  “I will not leave her, and you will not take her from my arms until it is time.”

  “But Alice . . .”

  “Tell Chester,” I commanded him. “Then someone help me so I can sit in the chair, just put a chair by a window. Is there a room where we can sit with a window? I want a window so we can look outside.”

  The doctor shook his head and then shuffled off, and I heard Chester scream out in the hospital hallway. I called to the nurse and asked her to hold Annie for just a moment while I used the bathroom. She told me I could not get up yet, but I pushed myself off the bed without acknowledging her and with each step to the bathroom, I left a spot of blood on the floor. I left the door open so I could see that she was holding Annie. When I came back, I found she had set out some sanitary napkins and underwear for me. I took Annie again as the nurse pushed a wheelchair over.

  Someone found us an old rocking chair and a room that looked out across the parking lot to a grove of oak trees. I noticed right away that there was one clump of trees that had red and orange leaves still clinging to their tops from the long-past fall, and I took great comfort in seeing that.

  While I waited for Chester, I pulled open my gown and guided Annie toward my breast. I thought if I could make her eat that maybe some kind of miracle would happen and she would be healed. My God, my God, my God she looked so normal and beautiful when she turned to take my breast. Her lips parted and her eyes were closed and her skin was as clear and bright as the snow falling across the lights on a January morning.

  Annie's sucking was pure reflex and natural instinct, but I imagine her body knew there was no time or hope because she didn't suck for long. When she pulled away I stretched her out across my lap and unwrapped her blanket. I touched every part of her: her tiny legs and her long eyelashes and the insides of her ears. That's how Chester found us; I never heard his feet pounding down the hall, and only when he touched my shoulder and I turned to see his tear-stained face did I know that he was in the room.

  It took the rest of that day and one night and then a morning before she died. These were hours so long and so painful that I wished a thousand times over for my own death. In those hours, everything I loved or could love, even Chester and Richard, was eclipsed by my silent, dying daughter.

  My only comfort then, and every moment in the days and years that followed up until this walk, was knowing that she did not suffer. I pulled her blankets and sleeper off of her when the doctor told me it would not be long, and I held her naked against my own chest. Her heart was thumping wildly but Annie looked like the angel that she is even when I knew she had taken her last breath. She simply stopped breathing and then her little fists that were clenched into balls unraveled and her legs dangled from her knees and I knew that it was over.

  Everything after that is a blur. I remember I would only let Chester take her, and what happened after that I never knew or cared about. I stayed in the hospital, curled up in a little ball for another day until Chester beseeched me that Richard was crying and could I please come home and what about the funeral?

  Life swirled around me. I acknowledged it but never joined in. No one but a few know that I never went to the church or the cemetery for the burial. Not even Richard remembers that I spent the day rocking by the window, holding Annie's blanket to my face. When Chester and Richard came home, I rose from the chair and ate with them and stepped back into their lives. But the truth is I never really lived again.

  It has taken me fifty years to come to this point. Fifty years before I could empty my heart of the sorrow that has suffocated my soul. I watched my husband grow old and learn how to walk with his head bowed to the winds of the world. Not once in these years did we sit and talk about the pain and the missing and how we should somehow be able to go on. It was as if nothing else mattered after Annie, and I know now that it was wrong to let my life, my husband's life and the life of my wandering son pass me by. But I was helpless, so helpless I felt like a woman without limbs rocking on the edge of a wide cliff, afraid to look down, to do something as simple as to open my eyes.

  Richard never remembered anything about Annie. We told him as he grew older when he asked us why the other kids had brothers and sisters and he didn't. Somehow Richard did just fine, and I like to think that he never knew about my deep well of sadness, about the wall of anguish that separated me from his father.

  He became a bright shining star for me, went off to college, and traveled the world with his geology hammers and trucks filled with rocks. When I saw his first child, a daughter no bigger than half of my arm, I could barely bring myself to touch her because her face had the same soft lines and tiny nose of Annie Marie. Now they all live so far away, just so far away.

  Today on the highway the weather has been warm. By noon I could feel the heat rising out of the asphalt against my hands. When I put one foot in front of the other hour after hour, I have a feeling that I can almost fly, that I can lift my arms and soar the rest of my life as if I have never been troubled or burdened by anything.

  Somehow this feeling is familiar and I keep seeing myself lying in the brown fall grass fifty years ago with my hands on my swollen belly watching the hawks circle above the fields and thinking then that I could fly because I was so happy.

  I'm closer now to that long-absent feeling, closer with each step, and although we are walking forward together, I feel as if I am stepp
ing back. Stepping back so that I can start over, from that time in the grass when I was happy and my heart flew with the birds.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MAYBE IT WAS THE SIGHT of Walter that threw Mary off course.

  He was the first living thing the women encountered as they not-so-silently moved up the highway from one telephone pole to another. They were counting stars, relishing the dark night that engulfed them and laughing heartily at the sight of an unused Tampax they discovered on the ground—as if someone had left it there as a marker for them.

  “Oh my God, look!” shouted Sandy, pushing at the feminine hygiene product with the toe of her dark tennis shoe. “This is a sign from heaven that we are on the correct highway.”

  Mary didn't laugh as the women gathered together, stopping simply because they wanted to, because they could, because now anything was possible. She stood back, hands on hips, eyes on the horizon, her heart beating wildly.

  Sandy queried, “Don't you all remember a thousand stories about the female reproductive system, cramps and babies, and the course and crimes of the uterus? How many of you have ever thrown a Tampax, used or unused, out of a car window?”

  “Dear,” Alice answered immediately, in a voice as proper and calm as the sky above them. “Women my age would never throw sanitary articles out of car windows. Didn't your mother and grandmother ever talk to you ladies about rags and wringer washing machines?” Alice had her hands clasped behind her, and she talked in a voice that her friends knew was not-so-serious, but they knew too that Alice has seen a side of life that they could barely comprehend. They knew as much of Alice as there was to know. These women would drag her from a burning car, take a bullet for her, jump off a cliff if they thought that any such actions would make Alice's life happier or easier. Despite their assorted miseries, the women perceive Alice as standing alone because she is the oldest and she has seen the most and she has been poor and constantly sad. She has lived through a time when women would never ever consider walking down a long highway in the middle of a black, cool spring night to exorcise their demons and flick their middle fingers at the world.